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| Unique Visitors: 0 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 4639 |
| Visitors Out: 329 |
| Total Visitors Out: 329 |
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| Variable Video |
| 2008-07-07 14:01:13 |
I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.
Here are some examples:
Dexter
Haunted house
Walts wisdom
Carmen has a crush on you
News3Online
Inspiring Escapes
There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:
Variable text - example: holding [...]...
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| Are Twitter Friend Adders Okay? |
| 2008-06-18 13:10:38 |
So with the launch of TwitterAdder and Twitter Adder for Firefox everyone is in a stir talking about how there is finally an easy way to add friends. What do I think of this new awesome service, um, not so awesome. I feel as if it kind of defeats the purpose of Twitter and if [...]...
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| Flash Twitter Adder |
| 2008-06-13 15:30:06 |
The following is a quick flash application i wrote to help people quickly connect to like minded individuals. This is the first version and i will add further functionality later (adding yourself if your not on the list). I obtained these lists from twitterpacks
No passwords or usernames are saved during this process however if you’re [...]...
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| What’s your Plaxo Pulse? |
| 2008-06-09 16:36:27 |
So what is Plaxo?
Here is my spin on Plaxos own definition …
Plaxo is a lot of things. It’s mostly about synchronizing most of the things that you and your connections do all across the web in a single place without you having to worry about any of it. It’s also about staying [...]...
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| Plurk vs Twitter |
| 2008-06-02 14:49:31 |
In case Twitter wasn’t taking up enough of your time, there is a new guy on the block, all blinged out in Ajax, looking for a little attention. I have to say, Plurk is a pretty cool Twitter clone. It allows all of the basic features of Twitter and then its spiced up a bit.
Status [...]...
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| Blogger vs. WordPress |
| 2008-05-29 09:57:26 |
If you haven’t noticed, I just switched from Blogger to WordPress about a week ago. Both are excellent services however I do enjoy WordPress a lot more now that I am finally using it. Now let me break down what I’ve found.
Blogger
Blogger was a great, easy to set up service.
All of my posts were automatically [...]...
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| Plaxo Users talk Twitter |
| 2008-05-25 22:31:01 |
About two weeks back I posted a survey "Why do you or don’t you use Twitter?". It was interesting to see how people responded.
Why Plaxo users Tweet
(Percents represent the percentage of Plaxo users who do use Twitter)
Why Plaxo users don’t Tweet
(Percents represent the percentage of Plaxo users who do not use Twitter)
The main [...]...
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| Interactive at Drupa |
| 2008-05-22 09:17:08 |
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of working on a cross media marketing campaign for Canon Europe. In true ‘I can do anything’ fashion, we at Magicomm decided to throw everything we had into it. The campaign is going to be showcased in the Canon booth at Drupa.
I’m not only excited [...]...
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| Twitter 101 |
| 2008-04-30 13:26:00 |
Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.What is Twitter?Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. - From WikipediaCommoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.Who do I follow?First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)Ther...
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| Interactive Video How-To and Examples |
| 2008-04-29 09:08:00 |
I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you'll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video: The best part is that i made each of those v...
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| Affiliate Marketing is Tarnishing Our Social Media |
| 2008-04-18 15:48:00 |
As more and more people look for the "easy solution to making money", they find themselves exploiting affiliate links on their favorite social networking sites. Unfortunately these social networking sites are also yours and my favorite social networking sites. It's sad to see the fruit of the web rotting in front of my eyes and, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. CAN-SPAMM laws only protect us from e-mail spam (or try to), but will there be a move to protect your favorite social media site? One can only hope. If the educational fiber of sites like Plaxo, Facebook, etc gets permanently tarnished to the point where you can't weed out the legitimate from illegitimate posts, t...
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| Favorite Social Media Sites |
| 2008-04-10 15:41:00 |
Below is a list of all the social networks I use and what I think about them. At the end I will list my personal favorites and i invite you all to publish links to your own profiles below.Ziki.com - I like this because it gives me free personal advertising. I think they spend like 10 bucks a month per person. Free being my favorite partTwitter - This one is cool because by following certain people i keep up to date on trends in the marketplaceBlogCatalog - I use for getting people to both my blog and my company's blog. Its also a cool place to meet other bloggers,Digg - I use as my general news service and i follow 1 friend at the moment, hopefully more will developLinkedIn - A great professional network. Bad thing about it is there are not alot of commun...
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| Gooruze.com |
| 2008-04-07 22:05:00 |
So this site looks interesting. Its a niche specific social networking site where people can ask questions and provide answers to other users posts. If all works accordingly this could be a very resourceful community. If anyone else is one here please check me out at jonbish.gooruze.com....
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| Desktop Takeover - April fools joke using Flash |
| 2008-04-01 13:40:00 |
This is a little trick I've pulled on some family members in the past and most recently on my boss for April Fools. All you need for this is a working version of Adobe Flash.If you cant see whats happening, basically the effect is that the desktop looks like its moving back and forth.So all I am doing here is tweening 2 instances of the desktop (which i Print Screened) over a static instance. Then all you do is full screen the SWF on your targets desktop. You can do a lot with this little gag including; hiding the users mouse, popping up text and moving icons at will.Back when GMail did their YouTube contest, i used this gag to simulate the envelope moving across multiple screens.A few things to remember when doing this a...
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| Anatomy of a Blog - Scripting for Social Media |
| 2008-03-27 09:32:00 |
There's a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part....So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.So ultimately I'm assuming you understand the general format and ben...
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| Realistic Fog/Smoke Effect |
| 2008-03-13 10:04:00 |
Here's another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.View: http://bishport.com/fog.htmlSource: zip...
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| Realistic Flame Effect |
| 2008-03-11 15:03:00 |
This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.View: http://bishport.com/flame3.htmlSource: zip...
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| Your Company on Google Maps |
| 2008-03-07 13:54:00 |
Google Maps is one of the most widely used online direction services on the web. That being said, have you checked your company's listing on Google maps recently. In Google Maps' Local Business Center you can manage your company's address, services, image and much more. It also boosted my company's site up on the local listings. It did take 2 weeks to verify the changes but it was definitely worth it....
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| Google Docs for Desktop |
| 2008-03-05 19:48:00 |
So while wandering around the Print OnDemand Expo in Boston I bumped into a small Google booth. So in conversation I was told that Google will be releasing a desktop version of Google Documents and Spreadsheets. Furthermore, they said you can expect to see a new link showing up on your Gmail page...I was told it will be something similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Where was this information 6 months ago when my company chose Basecamp over Google Apps. Although, i do love my Basecamp.In other news from OnDemand 08, some cool stuff is going on in the world of variable data publishing. Lots of cool web-to-print apps as well as InDesign plugins. Its also cool to see an array of PURL solutions on the market, however I am still...
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| Personalized Landing Pages 2.0 |
| 2008-03-03 21:33:00 |
So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where's the next step up?Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people's names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn't in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and ...
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| SEO and Flash |
| 2008-02-29 10:06:00 |
Can search engines read flash? A lot of people think that because flash is a program running on a website, it cannot be read by search engines. This is true to some extant however that does not mean there aren't methods to make your flash movies Search Engine friendly. In fact Google CAN index your flash movies. In "Google Can Now Index . . . Flash!An Interview with Michael Marshall by Robin Nobles" (here), they discuss how Google indexes your flash movie and different things the author can do to help the process.There are also other methods you can use if you want to be sure all search engines are indexing your flash movie. I use SWFobject. Here's a brief explanation of how it can be used with some examples.So first thing you need to do is upload swfobject...
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| PHPwcms |
| 2008-02-27 15:09:00 |
So I've been working with an awesome CMS called PHPwcms. Its been in rolling development now for a couple years however its excellent to work with from a programmers standpoint. Ive modded it a couple times to suit my needs based on the client. For instance there was one scenario where i had to make a custom search that displayed files and web pages alike (http://www.gwg.org). For my own company's website i used a blog developed by Shinypixel and modded it to incorporate tags and a sidebar navigation.So basically, like the site says, its an awesome framework for any site needing content management. The back end handles files very well and there is alot of room for modding in any which direction. So far i have three sites using it, all with different mods built into it and using it in a dif...
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| SEO for the Non-Techies |
| 2008-02-27 13:28:00 |
These are just a few ideas to get you started. Any true SEO expert will tell you there is a lot more that goes into it including but not limited to incoming link monitoring and maintenance, following Google’s new search engine patents, optimizing for keywords, etc.So there are 3 main things to remember when optimizing your website:1) Choose appropriate keywords:This includes making sure you have those keywords in 3 different places; your site content, your Meta content, and your incoming links. Also don’t use your keywords too much, this is known as "stuffing", but too little and Google won’t index your site properly.2) Friendly URLs:The following is BAD:mysite.com/index.php?car=jeep&type=wranglerThis is GOOD:mysite.com/jeep/wranglerThe difference is easy to see, one is easier to rea...
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| Michael Williams Glexia |
| 2008-01-22 15:27:00 |
Michael Williams is on the cutting edge of technology innovation and software creation. Glexia is the hub of everything web 2.0. Williams and myself have collaborated on several projects to date including a few cross-media campaigns the competition cant touch. PHP and MYSQL are the laguages of choice. Michael Williams can be reached at Michael.Williams@glexia.com for a quote on any project ideas you might have. Glexia could in fact be the way of the future....
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| Favicon |
| 2007-11-06 13:11:00 |
So i wanted to add the little icon next to my URL in the address bar so i went on a hunt for the easiest solution (kinda counter-productive as i could have just downloaded a program however I so love to find new SAAS apps online). So i finally ran across this site. This was pretty much exactly what i was looking for and it was very easy to use. I went on and created 7 icons. I ended up using the first one i made for my site, but they still all look kinda cool....
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| JonInEssex.com |
| 2007-11-06 10:36:00 |
So I've been working on this site on the side for a couple of weeks now. Ive mostly just been waiting around for content for the site. This was a different kind of site for me to create because I needed to find a way to make it easy to update for someone who has little or no knowledge about the web.First thing I did was use photoshop to automate the thumbnail creation process. This turned out to be more useful than i thought as it also let me create medium size pictures for viewing within the site as well as very customizable watermark options. This was all part of the "Web Photo Gallery" option which basically created a little mini site on the fly. This is nice and all however if the photographer ever wanted to edit the site or add more pictures all he would know how to do is create new s...
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| Flash in the future |
| 2007-10-18 09:37:00 |
People are starting to steer away from using flash in their websites and I think this is STUPID. We're in the middle of an information revolution and Flash is one of our more advanced tools for making this happen. I think websites should use flash, as long as they do it right.First off, people believe that flash is SEO unfriendly. Let me clarify, it's flash developers who make their flash SEO unfriendly. Their are multiple ways to make entire websites in flash and Search engines can and will index them accordingly. One way of doing this is by using Geoff Stearns' swfObject javascript. You just link to the main javascript file in the page head, and then call the function at the point on the page where you want your Flash movie to replace the default content....
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| LIghtbox++ vs XHTML Validation |
| 2007-09-25 18:50:00 |
So I was tying so hard to keep my portfolio XHTML valid. When i added the Lightbox++ script (which is a modified version of Lightbox) my portfolio had some errors according to the W3 standards. So after doing a little research and looking around I came to this solution.First, the problem was that the doctype wasn't recognizing the height and width attributes i was setting in the tag.So here was my solution.<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd\" \[<!ATTLIST a width CDATA #IMPLIED><!ATTLIST a height CDATA #IMPLIED>]\ >The bold part being what I had to add. Hope i saved someone out there some time....
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| Top 5 Coolest Tricks in Flash |
| 2007-09-20 13:44:00 |
These are some of my favorite tricks Ive learned throughout the years in flash. Granted Ive never had a use for some of them and others only kinda half work. Nonetheless i think they're pretty cool do here it goes. 1)Right Click:this.onEnterFrame = function(){if (ASnative(800, 2)(1)){/// Right click has been executed}}So this is cool and everything however there is no guarantee future flash versions will support this because ASnative() is undocumented. However I have found this code useful if I was ever trying to detect whether the left mouse button is being held down. Just change the 1 to a 2. Oh and if you change it to a 4 it detect middle click.... whoda thunk. 2) Smoke effect:This ones kinda easy. There is this method: http://www.toxiclab.org/tutorial.a...
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| XML/XSL Portfolio |
| 2007-09-19 19:20:00 |
So i just created my portfolio with XML and an XSL style sheet. Im not gonna lie it's pretty cool. All i have to do now is update my XML, which is just a list for all you people who have no clue what it is, and the page is updated. The best part was how easy Dreamweaver made the whole process. All you do is bind the XML to the XSL sheet while your developing it and you get a live view of your page. You pretty much just drag and drop the elements of the XML into tables, images, URLs etc. Then when all is said and done i added a little CSS to make it look good. This could be the beginning of a long and prosperous relationship with XSL.Portfolio: lawjik.net/bishop...
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